6 Saddest Fanbases for Old TV Shows

This week, a trailer for the new Star Trek movie came out and it is awesome.

Awesome.

But a bunch of the really nerdy Star Trek fans disagreed saying that it "looked too much like Star Wars" because of the fact this movie actually has a decent budget. Or they complained about even stupider things like how this Kirk has blue eyes while Shatner has brown eyes. While all of this is bad, I found that there are far worse fanbases out there than even hardcore Trekkies. With that, I present: The 6 Saddest Fanbases for Old TV Shows.

6. Gargoyles
You might remember Gargoyles, it was that cartoon that you could watch it for like 4 episodes and still have no idea what was going on with the plot. It was that show that all the creepy kids seemed to like a little too much. Well, those creepy kids have grown up into creepy adults and they have never stopped liking this show. Gargoyles has been off the air since 1996 but the fan community has still been active, holding a convention every year where people show up dressed as their favorite Gargoyles characters.

Gargoyle costume (or cosplay) from their convention.
This is one of the most tasteful costumes.

Gargoyles fans still keep a website active, The Gargoyles Fans Website (clever name), where they somewhat frequently post new erotic Gargoyles fan-fiction and update ‘humorous’ lists, such as You Know You’ve Been Watching Too Much Gargoyles When. I’ve decided to take some of my favorite selections from the afforemented list and add in my own witty (i.e. dickish) commentary. Gargoyles fans' items are italicized, my comments are in bold.

Gargoyles Fan:You walk by a store and your immediate thought is: "I wonder if they have Gargoyles stuff?"
Me: I bet they don’t.
Gargoyles Fan: You're talking to a friend about time zone differences and he says: "I guess your gargoyles would be awake for two more hours, huh?"
Me: If my ‘friend’ said that, I would drive through the two time zones just to punch him in the mouth.
Gargoyles Fan: You find yourself going to gothic architecture webpages rather than gothic music pages...
Me: If this is true, then Gargoyles actually has some redeeming value.
Gargoyles Fan: When you are stretching in class you growl and snarl.
Me: Don’t blame your Tourette’s on Gargoyles.
Gargoyles Fan: You are constantly FLYING down stairs, and wear your coat unzipped so it looks that way too.
Me: Yes, unzipping your coat creates the perfect illusion of flight.
Gargoyles Fan: When someone asks you if you want to get stoned and you say "YES!" But then you realize he's not thinking the same thing you are.
Me: Bet this guy doesn’t have to worry about talking to friends in different time zones or any friends at all, for that matter.
Gargoyles Fan:You come home on a Friday afternoon and realize you have absolutely nothing to do.
Me: You would have this same problem even if Gargoyles never existed.

Ultra Sad Fact:
This is the description of a story in the Gargoyles Fan Fiction database just posted in October:
"Thanks to Cecile Vene's manipulations, Eris and Broyze are revealed to the Manhattan Clan who also see Thailia for the first time bond against her will by Fang enraging all of them especially Goliath. The X-Men and Marauders arrive on the scene upsetting Cecile Vene and forcing her to alter her plans to keep Thaila�s/Thailog�s real identity secret. Meanwhile, Eris�s prisoners deal with their newest imprisonment and other things they are currently learning about thanks to information provided by Titania and Demona. Timothy is faced with an unexpected situation the half human, half gargoyle didn�t count on and Chaos Lord Broyze decides to personally deal with those who dare to confront him and Eris with a display of power the likes which none of them have seen. WARNING: This round robin story contains scenes of GRAPHIC RAPE, VIOLENCE, TORTURE, MURDER, and other possible extreme subject matter that some may not find suitable to read."
There is someone out there who understands what this means and, worse, is turned on by it.

5. Dharma and Greg
Dharma and Greg was probably the least interesting show of all time. It didn’t really suck like a lot of shows but it wasn’t exactly good either. My feelings for Dharma and Greg are about the same as I feel for a rock at the side of the road. I have nothing for or against a rock, it’s just something that’s there. So I was surprised to find that there was actually a MySpace page for that nondescript rock of a show but that it happens to be one of the worst MySpace pages I have ever seen. The page is filled with so many bad graphics and YouTube links that it might crash your browser, you should just trust this screenshot.

When the creator of this page is before St. Peter, she will have to answer for this.

I can say without a doubt, this is the single worst combination of colors and words that have ever been put on a page together. Right away, the page’s creator puts at the top: “The show was cancelled because Jenna Elfman left to work on a Broadway show!!!!!!!!!!!!” It makes me wonder how many times she was written by someone saying, “That show was cancelled because it sucked,” before she decided on that aggressive defense. But she also has a strong offense with her great banner that says the following:


She could have just made that banner the link to the petition (I’m sorry: petion”) and not had to bother with the “small text” link but that would have involved learning the slightest bit of HTML and that would take away from precious time watching Dharma and Greg reruns. I also took a look at her petion and I’m not exactly sure what she is trying to get people to sign a petion for... I assumed it was to try and bring back Dharma and Greg but I think it might just be a petition to prove to the world that there are people out there who actually enjoy Dharma and Greg.

Ultra Sad Fact:
The horrible Dharma and Greg MySpace page still isn’t as bad as Jenna “Dharma” Elfman’s own MySpace page where she lets her Scientology hang right out there and posts paranoid rants against modern psychology.

4. Firefly
God created Firefly fans so Star Trek fans could have someone to make fun of. Firefly was a show that lasted less time than a bad case of the flu and featured cowboys-in-space going on traditional Western adventures… but in space. Fox quickly cancelled the show which Firefly fans blamed on the evilness of Fox executives as opposed to the fact that a statistically small percentage of the population wants to watch cowboys-in-space.

Screenshot from Firefly.

The fans took on the moniker of “Browncoats” after the rebel group that had lost the show’s space-equivalent to the Civil War and started a whiny campaign to try and bring back the show. Soon, Firefly fans were everywhere on the internet and always talking about Firefly, they became the most single-mindedly annoying group online until the emergence of Ron Paul fans.

Firefly fans hold a grudge against the Fox network to this day. It doesn’t matter that most of the Fox programming executives that were there in 2001 when Firefly got cancelled aren’t working there anymore. “Browncoats” believe that the Fox network is somehow a living, evil being that seeks to destroy their joy and happiness as opposed to a large corporation that wants to make more ad revenue.

The saddest story about Firefly fans comes from a guy I went to college with who had to work at Point Theatre on Madison’s West Side during the opening day midnight showing of the Firefly movie, Serenity. You see, the Firefly story should be a happy one, after heavy DVD sales and lots of online Firefly traffic, Universal decided to bring the show back as a movie. But still, even on the opening night of the movie, Firefly fans had to make it annoying. A number of ‘Browncoats’ got up before the movie started and gave a speech about how they had kept fighting and never gave up. You guys bought some DVDs, you didn’t fight in some great war against FOX. You nerds got what you wanted so now try acting like normal people, so sit down and just watch the freaking movie.

Ultra Sad Fact:
Firefly fans try to keep awareness of their favorite show alive by putting references to Firefly into almost every Wikipedia article possible. Getting the show mentioned in 50,000 Wikipedia articles isn’t going to bring the show back. Guys, you managed to get a major Hollywood movie out of your 16-episode series. Now move on.

3. Empty Nest
Do you remember that show that came on after Golden Girls? I remembered the title Empty Nest but beyond that, nothing. As I liked to watch a good Golden Girls now and again, I had watched several episodes of Empty Nest when I was too lazy to change the channel but have no memory of them whatsoever. Perhaps I drank away any memories of the show. Well, after taking a look at the Empty Nest fansite, I don’t really mind that I’m glad my drinking destroyed those memories as opposed to my memories of parasailing, thanks brain damage.

Brain, you made the right choice on which of these to remember.

The saddest thing about the Empty Nest fansite is how it’s different from all the other fansites I’ve seen. Most of the others sites seem to be a community effort about a range of people who all share some odd devotion to a bad tv show. But his site seems to be the work on one solitary genderless individual who decided one day to a fansite about Empty Nest his/her primary hobby. The site features every magazine article and interview about Empty Nest retyped for the webpage so that the author of the site can preserve them for the ages. It’s not unlike the Medieval monks who meticulously made copies of important documents, only the monks saved the knowledge of Western Civilization as opposed to quotes by the Empty Nest cast-members about how Richard Mulligan was hilarious on AND off the set.

Ultra Sad Fact:
Author is trying to finish “Where Are They Now?” section of website and is desperately looking for information on what happened to ‘Dreyfuss,’ the dog on the show. Dude, show’s been off the air for 14 years, pretty sure the dog is dead.

2. X-Files
It seems a little odd to me that there are devoted X-Files fans in 2008. Sure, it was a show that myself, along with many of my friends, were into in the 90’s but now… it’s like someone telling me they just got a movie on VHS or really excited to drink some Zima, it just sounds so… outdated. Even X-Files fansites look like they are stuck in the mid-90s.

I blame Bush for destroying the credibility of the X-Files. I mean, in the 90’s, we believed the government could pull off a massive secret evil conspiracy but the Bush Administration, with it’s handling of Iraq, Katrina, Gitmo and many more, showed us how the government sucks at pulling off it’s own evil conspiracies much less keeping them secret. For God’s sakes, in the first X-Files movie they had us believe that FEMA could manage to genetically engineer smart bees with an alien virus when in real life, FEMA couldn’t even handle delivering bottles of water after Katrina.

No, that's just a reflection.

Though maybe the show itself deserves some of the blame for losing most of it’s fanbase. After several seasons of bad episodes where it became ever more obvious that they were just making it all up as they went along, a few people still got excited about a 2nd movie. X-Files fans are hardcore Charlie Brown-ing it, going for that football yet again even though they know what’s going to happen. Anybody who still went to see that second movie after years of crappy X-Files is a sad, sad person.

Ultra Sad Fact:
I went to the 2nd X-Files movie on opening weekend.

1. Full House
Full House was a legend, it gave us such classic idioms as “Have Mercy,” “Cut It Out,” and “You’ve Got It Dude,” as well as the song “You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morissette. And because of Full House’s far reaching fame, there are still a ton of sad people who are still heavily invested in the sitcom with far more websites than I want to go into.. But I want to focus on one particularly sad branch of the fanbase, people who are fans of the young adult novels based on the show. Fans who so obsessed about these books that they CREATED A SEPARATE IMAGINARY UNIVERSE for them.

There are fans of this book over the age of 12.
And they are scary.

Due to the fact that the writers of the books were different than those on the Full House TV show, characters act somewhat differently. There are also inconsistencies with how things happen in the book compared to the show which sad, sad fans obsess over (OMG! Joey never moves up to the 2nd floor and continues to live in the basement in the books. Different Universe!). Now, most reasonable people would just blame this on lazy novel writers who didn’t obsess over every detail on a crappy sitcom, who would blame them? They are writing the literary equivalent of a Happy Meal. People bought these books because they had pre-meth Jodie Sweetin on the cover, not because they are great prose.

But the Tanner fans that couldn’t deal with the idea of inconsistencies in their Full House got together and used the differences in characterization and plot minutia to create a parallel ‘book universe’ that diverges from the tv-show universe. To quote these fans, in the book universe, “Jesse (is) possibly always (living) in the attic. This may have occurred because the writers felt it more likely that only actual family members would normally room on the floor with the dad and the girls. However, many fans also feel that this room placement logically explains the different personalities. The girls' uncle is the mother figure to Michelle in the TV series… With an office in the fourth bedroom, it is presumed that the girls' oldest sister D.J. filled that role early in their lives, and was able to mold them into being more mature than the sometimes rebellious Jesse.”

If that wasn’t clear enough, a guy by the name of Doug Fowler decided to explain how the timelines diverged in a 492-page epic Word file (That’s crazy! Who would post it as a .doc file? You think he would post it as a .pdf) to explain the chronology of how the Full House ‘book universe’ diverges from the Full House tv series. Let me repeat this, someone wrote 492 pages worth to explain away the simple fact that the writers of the books were even crappier writers than the writers of the show.

492. Pages. On. This.

Ultra Sad Fact:
Skimming over about 10 pages of the epic 492 page Full House chronology includes at least a dozen mentions of Christ. Fowler decided that Full House wasn’t wholesome enough yet and wrote in his timeline that the Tanners were testifying for the Lord when Good Morning San Francisco went off the air. Though his religious experience gave him experience in trying to over-explain inconsistencies in badly written texts.